A standard of measurement possessing sufficient identifiable characteristics common to the individual units of a population to facilitate economical and efficient comparison of attributes for units selected from a sample.

(science and technology)

A reference value against which a measurement or a series of measurements may be compared.

Benchmark

A permanent reference mark, fixed to a building or to the ground, whose height above a standard datum level has been accurately determined by survey.

benchmark

(benchmark)

A standard program or set of programs which can be
run on different computers to give an inaccurate measure of
their performance.

"In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies:
lies, damn lies, and benchmarks."

A benchmark may attempt to indicate the overall power of a
system by including a "typical" mixture of programs or it may
attempt to measure more specific aspects of performance, like
graphics, I/O or computation (integer or floating-point).
Others measure specific tasks like rendering polygons,
reading and writing files or performing operations on
matrices. The most useful kind of benchmark is one which is
tailored to a user's own typical tasks. While no one
benchmark can fully characterise overall system performance,
the results of a variety of realistic benchmarks can give
valuable insight into expected real performance.

Benchmarks should be carefully interpreted, you should know
exactly which benchmark was run (name, version); exactly what
configuration was it run on (CPU, memory, compiler options,
single user/multi-user, peripherals, network); how does the
benchmark relate to your workload?

benchmark

A performance test of hardware and/or software. There are various programs that very accurately test the raw power of a single machine, the interaction in a single client/server system (one server/multiple clients) and the transactions per second in a transaction processing system. However, it is next to impossible to benchmark the performance of an entire enterprise network with a great degree of accuracy.

Addressable Storage Capacity: represents the total storage that can be read and written by application programs on Host Systems and is directly available for use by application programs that implement this benchmark (such as the Workload Generator).

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